Active Member

Frankly a CR of 450 is going to make for a lousy picture. Most cheap/bright projectors are designed for the business presentation market where a bright image viewable with background lighting is needed .. this is the opposite of what makes for good movie watching. 1500 lumens, even after allowing for the inevitable real-world number being a lot less than that is really too bright for a home cinema in most cases, especially I would say in a smallish room like yours.

If your budget is limited then something like the Epsom TW10H is pretty much the minimum spec machine which will give a satisfying picture I would suggest.

The usual recommendation is to try to demo before purchase, that said, I know it isn't easy and I've bought 4 machines sight unseen.

Well-known Member

Why not look out on the "for sale" boards here & try to buy a low use Panasonic AE500, Sanyo Z2 or a Hitachi TX100 (think thats the right number). These should be around the £650 - £700 mark & will give you an incredible picture together with HDTV compatability ?

Active Member

so contrast is more important than a high lumes when using as a video projector in a dark room??

I notice that the resolution is only (854*480) Would this be suitable at a distance of 3m?? or would I be better going for a higher res?

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Absolutely. If you look at the sorts of projectors Paul mentioned they're all less than 1000 (on paper, in practice they're all a lot less than that), the CR is vital, again the figures in the specs are never seen in real-life, however you want one a lot higher than those like the one you were looking at.

That resolution is on the low side these days, the important thing though isn't so much the viewing distance as the size of screen. General advice is that the viewing distance should be at least 1.5 times screen width, preferably more with lower resolution projectors.

So if you viewed from 9' back then you're looking at a width of 5' or so, meaning a 69" diagonal 16:9 screen would be the sort of thing you'd be thinking about I would suggest. How much pixellation and 'screen door' are things that annoy is down to personal tastes, there are no hard and fast rules in this area.

A higher resolution would be better of course, but then you're looking at least 50% more on the price for a 1280x720.

Active Member

It isn't easy to decide, especially if you can't get to many (any?) demos, but it's a lot of money and if you're not in a position to take a chance then it pays to take your time .. the initial 'wow' soon wears off and you then need to live with whatever defects your choice has, and all choices available to mere mortals will have some negative aspects to them, the perfect projector (if there's one at all) costs well into 5 figures.